Percy Fawcett’s Lost City of Z Expedition

In 1925 the British explorer Percy Fawcett entered Brazil’s Mato Grosso with his son Jack Fawcett and Raleigh Rimell. Fawcett believed that evidence from Indigenous knowledge, earlier journeys and documentary research pointed towards a substantial pre-Columbian settlement in the Amazon, which he referred to as Z.

The party travelled with limited equipment and sent its last known message from a camp Fawcett called Dead Horse Camp. Its disappearance produced repeated searches, disputed testimony and enduring theories about whether the explorers died through accident, disease, violence or another cause. No explanation has been established from conclusive evidence.

For historical books, the expedition connects twentieth-century exploration with archaeology, colonial assumptions about the Amazon and the consequences of outsiders entering Indigenous territories. David Grann’s The Lost City of Z reconstructs Fawcett’s life and disappearance while examining later archaeological work on complex Amazonian societies.